Career politicians? The Syria rebellion saw a very different class of MP

Many of the MPs who voted with their consciences over Syria are not desperate for office. This trend can only be good

MPs are becoming less willing to toe the party line. 'For a long time political behaviour in the Commons seemed locked in a time warp; but there is now an escape committee at work.'
Photograph: Graeme Robertson Graeme Robertson/Graeme Robertson

Everyone seems to agree that last week's Commons vote on Syria was "good for parliament", even if they disagree about the outcome. In some ways this is curious, since there is also general agreement that the whole episode was a bit of a mess and that many, perhaps most, MPs have finished up in a position on Syria where they do not really want to be.

What people seem to like is parliament asserting its right to be involved in a decision about military action, part of a wider assertiveness of the legislature in relation to the executive. It shows that parliament matters. It also shows that more MPs are less willing than they used to be simply to take voting instructions from the whips (or to keep dissent within the internal confines of party and away from the division lobbies). The public seems to like this too.

It might have been better to have kept the whips out of the Syria vote altogether. That might have enabled the Commons to come to a more coherent conclusion on a matter that crossed party lines and required MPs to make their own judgments. It was the insertion of whips, thereby reinforcing the Commons culture of not voting for a motion put down by the opposing party even if you agreed with it, that caused much of the confused outcome.

The vote was not an aberration, but part of a developing trend. Fifty years ago one authority on parliament pronounced that there was no longer any point in measuring "dissidence" (not voting for the party line) in the Commons because there was now so little of it. Party discipline, at least in the voting lobbies, was the golden rule of politics in Britain. In recent times that has been changing, markedly so in the Blair years and even more markedly under the coalition. There are still penalties for not following the whips into the voting lobbies (as Tory MP Jesse Norman has just discovered), but also more MPs willing to pay them.

In many ways this is the Commons just catching up with the world outside. The old ideological bunkers have collapsed in the electorate and their survival in the Commons was increasingly anachronistic. Parties (and whips) are indispensable for the organised conduct of politics, but they will necessarily command less political territory than in the past. Many issues do not sit in neat party boxes and MPs, like everybody else, increasingly know this; and a more informed, internet-savvy electorate demands a new kind of relationship with its political representatives. The Commons is changing because politics is changing. For a long time political behaviour in the Commons seemed locked in a time warp; but there is now an escape committee at work.

This will make for a looser, more open kind of politics, in parliament as well as outside. Party management becomes a trickier business. As old political allegiances decline, so political behaviour in the Commons necessarily changes too. Traditional party games no longer excite in the way they once did. MPs are obliged to rethink their representational role, along with their parties. We used to contrast the looser grip of party on political behaviour in the United States with the tight disciplines here. The contrast is now much less sharp, and this trend is likely to continue.

There is a lot of attention given these days to the dominance of politics by career politicians, those people who have done little or nothing else in life apart from politics. This is certainly a trend (in 1979 only 3% of MPs had a previous career in politics, but this had risen to nearly 15% in 2010), and a trend the public seems to dislike. It fuels the charge about a "political class" out of touch with real life. The current leaderships of all the main political parties seem to exemplify this tendency.

What is less remarked upon, but perhaps even more significant, is the parallel growth of a class of non-career politicians. These are people who may come to the Commons later in life, having done other things first. They are content to be members of parliament, want to do the job well and are not desperate for office. This makes them impervious to the usual disciplines and inducements that whips dispense. They have a streak of independence that makes them dangerous to the party machines. The Syria vote announced their arrival.